Category: I have regrets

Medea is an argument between high school students where almost everyone winds up dead in the aftermath. Hero Jason of the Argonauts and Golden Fleece fame, after marrying the woman who gave him that glory, abandons her and their children to marry a princess. Medea, understandably, is not pleased. Jason can’t quite wrap his mind around why she isn’t thrilled that he’s moving up in the world and really resents her refusal to see that he is dumping her for the good of their family. Beyond the shock value, I can’t see why this play has been so popular for so long. It’s violent, sexist, and depressing. The writing is mediocre. The ending is grasping. After having a plot set securely on the ground, Euripides has a flying, golden chariot rescue Medea, which maybe was a normal literary tool for the ancient Greeks, but seemed very desperate to me. Euripides wanted her to have her final, horrifying confrontation with Jason but couldn’t think of a way to do it that didn’t result in her death. This way they can trade verbal jabs, but Jason can’t throw spears at her. No one in this cast is likeable. No one wins. To even call Medea’s actions a Pyrrhic victory suggests too strongly that her battle of egos with Jason had a winner of any type. It did not. Content yourself with the Cliff’s notes for this bloody play, and spend your precious moments on something else.

A heavily abridged version of the first book of the tetralogy that makes up Gargantua & Pantagruel, this book has some unique features to offer the discerning reader of classic literature. Sermons. Multiple occurrences where thousands drown in urine. High minded discussion of classical education syllabuses. Potty humour. Soliloquies praising god and king immediately follow a lengthy, detailed discussion of codpieces. Of course Gargantua has the most fashionable codpiece, covering the most wondrous junk. Plus he’s a giant so his codpiece is huge. But how huge, you ask? Don’t fret! Rabelais includes measurements in case you want to make a scale model of Gargantua’s outfit. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book where the author’s giddy squealing about the perfection of the main character eclipsed the plot. It’s also been a long time since I read a book with so many codpieces in it. It’s been even longer since I had call to use the word codpiece five times in a row. Rabelais used it more frequently though. It’s a good thing this Great Books edition didn’t edit out all the talk of wardrobes and meals or the story would have been 10 pages long. Basically, Gargantua’s parents do the hokey pokey; after 11 months (because he’s awesome) Gargantua is born. His bad tutors turn him into a useless lump, he gets a better tutor and goes back to being awesome, goes on some awesome adventures, pees on some people, fights in a war, his horse pees on some people, and then he founds the most awesome monastery in the history of the world. Pantagruel doesn’t show up in this book, but he’s Gargantua’s son so he’s probably awesome too. If you’re really committed to fleshing out your classical literature checklist then I guess you should pick up Gargantua & Pantagruel, but otherwise only read it if you really like lowbrow humour. I basically covered it for you here, with mentions of sexism and some gore in battle scenes you now know all the pertinent details. You’re welcome. I know, I’m awesome.

Preparation for the Next Life received many five star reviews on Goodreads. People raved about it. Wretched protagonists Zou Lei and Brad Skinner start an unlikely romance – she’s an undocumented immigrant, he’s a traumatised war vet – after meeting in a decrepit basement noodle shop. The writing is sparse, the sentences are simple, and every word is crushingly depressing. Lei and Skinner barely scrape by. The landscape is one of endless garbage and graffiti, rot and refuse. Attempts at progress end in failure, when they’re undertaken at all. Supporting characters exist only to undermine their plans and drag them back down. The whole novel is a bucket full of crabs, except someone has thrown in weapons. Graphic violence proliferates. Sexual coercion, rape, and the threat of rape are frequent themes. Brad’s relationship with Zou Lei verges on abusive, and while he’s presented in a sympathetic light and the problems are shown to stem from the emotional, physical, and psychological trauma he endured in Iraq – and for which the army refuses to treat him – I had a hard time seeing this as an “unsentimental love story” as The New York Times describes it on the cover. I kept thinking of Lolita. It’s constantly described as a romance, but is really a horrifying story of kidnapping and child abuse. The unrelieved despair soaking from every page made the ending almost cathartic; there finally seemed like the smallest chance that luck was changing. When you live right on the margin of society, dull stability is a dream come true. Glorious triumph? Not so much.

Because of the subject matter, violence, and overall heartcrushingness of the plot, I found this to be a very emotionally draining book. It’s definitely well written. The story is unique. But I’m recommending it with heavy caveats. Tread carefully.

Larson’s exhaustive recounting of the planning, building and execution of the 1893 World’s Fair is a deeply problematic book. It opens with Larson talking about two unnamed men; praising their unmatched skills in their chosen activities. One, naturally, is Burnham, the architect who choreographed the great dance that was the creation of the World’s Fair. The other is serial killer H H Holmes. It takes a special kind of person to praise the abilities of a murderer. Things do not improve from there. Chapters are florid with details. When Larson is writing about the fair, it’s not a problem. However. Each alternating chapter covers Holmes’ cruel machinations in extensive detail. Excessively gruesome detail. I can’t put enough warnings in here about how graphic it is. Worse is the way Larson writes about it. He seems to revel in the violence. The plotting. As though he idolizes Holmes more than the people who built this remarkable Fair in the face of well-nigh insurmountable odds. And on top of all that – as if that wasn’t bad enough – the language Larson chooses tends to dehumanize and objectify Holmes’ victims. It’s not clear whether this is a misguided attempt to present Holmes’ state of mind, or Larson just isn’t aware of how his choice of language is representing the dead. The numerous dead. Holmes gets included in this story in the first place because Larson contends that he uses the Fair to lure people to their deaths, but had the Fair not taken place Holmes would have been killing anyways. The Fair and Holmes were both in Chicago at the same time, but that is all they share, and I was deeply troubled by Larson’s attempts to represent Holmes’ heartless activities as on par with the incredible achievements of the architects and engineers who created a truly unparalleled exhibition of beauty and technological advancement. The Devil in the White City would have been a much stronger work without those parts.

This was the last story in a book of three, so this is going to focus on The Black Prince and Murdoch’s general style. Each of Murdoch’s stories is centered around one character with some egregious emotional flaw: selfishness, extravagant insecurity, obsessiveness, misogyny, an inability to see other people as human beings. Her main characters find their downfall, and sometimes redemption, through their faults. Letters feature periodically in the stories. The Sea, The Sea and The Black Prince are both “written” by the main characters, as memoirs at the end of their lives. Marriages factor heavily in all three stories and there are frequent remarks by one or other characters about what “private” places marriages are. Private here is a synonym for inscrutable. Deep. Mysterious. Often this opinion is espoused by a character who has never been married. Or divorced long ago. A string of acrimoniously ended relationships. Is it marriage that is so depthless? Or is it just that we can never fully comprehend any intimate connection between two people, especially one which has existed for decades? Two people can perceive the same event very differently. Two people can perceive the same person very differently, a concept Murdoch explores more fully in The Black Prince.

The Black Prince is a complicated tale with an unreliable narrator who may or may not be making his story up out of whole cloth. Additional pieces get sewn on in the form of postscripts by other unreliable characters. Everyone is full of lies, and when Bradley Pearson isn’t lying he’s blathering on about Art and struggle and how the True Artist refuses to profane the god of Art with anything less than a perfect offering even if it means never producing anything at all. Pearson believes his “inability to create is continuously significant.” (29) As if one learns and improves through will power alone, instead of practice. His rambling, didactic, sluggish monologues are agony. Murdoch’s luscious descriptions don’t seem to crop up as often here as in her other offerings. Possibly because she allowed Pearson to do the writing, and his voice is completely different from her own. I kept having to resist the urge to flip back to one of the other novels and read it instead. I kept flipping to the end of this one to see how many more pages were left. Not a good sign. While all the books had elements of sexism in them, with toxic masculinity and objectification of women, misogyny seemed to figure more strongly in The Black Prince. Murdoch herself takes the time to describe both genders, which I’ve found is a refreshing novelty in an author. She does tend to emphasize the women’s attractiveness. Its daily fluctuations are minutely catalogued. In a way it’s a relief to have women who aren’t constantly, stunningly, gorgeous. Pearson himself struggles to view women as autonomous beings. He writes about his love interest’s entire life being some sort of construction pre-ordained to push him through strife into greatness, to allow him to suffer so he can create his masterpiece of literature (this book). He makes grand pronouncements about never contacting her, never seeing her, never telling her, and immediately breaks them. It’s equally tragic and comic. There is nothing he succeeds at. It’s hard to believe he has any redeeming qualities. Many of the characters are reprehensible, at least from Pearson’s perspective. Don’t read this book if you’re feeling down about humanity. It won’t help you feel better. Find a charity to volunteer for.

Content warnings for: violence, suicide, murder, rape, maybe abduction, maybe abuse, and some weird attitudes surrounding characters with Jewish ancestors. And a whole Lolita-esque plotline that made me wonder if Nabokov or Murdoch read the other growing up. They had some very common elements. If you hated Lolita with the passion of a thousand fiery suns, it might not hurt to give The Black Prince a pass and read all of Murdoch’s other brilliant, intricate works first. I don’t want to say you won’t be missing out, but you won’t feel like you’re missing out unless you’ve flipped the final page of the last book and find you’re still craving more Murdoch. If you get to that point, then you can read The Black Prince.

It’s never a good sign when I have to start a book review off with a disclosure statement, but here we are. I didn’t finish Gomorrah. There was nothing I liked about it. Sentence structure. Lurid descriptions of violence only included to be shocking. Saviano’s subtle ennobling of mafia bosses. The few redeeming characters are either crushed by the machine or killed for fighting back. And vilified after death by a complicit media, so that they don’t become martyrs. This book has almost ruined Italy for me. There isn’t an item you can buy, nowhere you can go, nothing that isn’t controlled by one despicable crime network or another. Saviano tries to make the kingpins seem like sympathetic figures. He bemoans the difficulties the bosses have of spending their millions (which they’ve coerced and stolen from the people of Italy) while living the life of a fugitive, both from the law and from the other crime syndicates. He assures us that the people working ludicrous hours for pittance wages with no benefits, job protection, human rights or physical safety are still much better off than they would be if the work was done legally, because then “prices would go up and there’d be no more market–which means the work would disappear from Italy.” (26) Even if that is true, I have a hard time swallowing the idea that the solution is to let the mob continue to control everything. While Saviano’s rage starts to come out at the evil surrounding him towards the few final chapters of the book (which I skimmed), the majority of it read to me as the kind of shoulder-shrugging resignation to some flaw not really worth fixing. The whole thing made me sick to my heart, and while I stand in awe of Saviano’s bravery at publishing something like this and hope that he can live out the rest of his life in peace and safety, I’m also grateful to have quit reading this book. I highly recommend it if you’re a fan of true crime with a strong stomach for graphic violence and descriptions of torture. Not? You may need to give it a pass.

Originally published on September 2nd, 2012
I had to force myself to finish this series, and I’m not going to bother separately reviewing the rest of it. The first book was pretty enjoyable, and the plot was reasonably well done. But by the time I got into the second book the twists and turns just seemed like filler; Dart-Thornton dragging out any idea that would make the series the length it needed to be. And her penchant for endless description! It drove me completely insane. In one book she spends a page and a half describing the exhilaration of flight. Nearly every sentence starts with “It was…” How did she justify more than two lines? I don’t know why the editor let her get away with that because it made me want to rip out my hair. Overall: good idea, bad execution.

“This is not a book to be tossed lightly aside. It should be thrown with great force.” -Dorothy Parker

Originally published September 9th, 2012
I usually adore Shel Silverstein. But from the first time I heard this story I hated it and found it deeply disturbing. Love isn’t parasitic, taking and taking and never giving back or thinking of others. Relationships where one party does nothing but give and the other party does nothing but take aren’t something to celebrate, they’re abusive and unhealthy. Glorifying them is at least as bad, especially when it’s aimed at children.

Originally published September 29th, 2013
I. Give. Up. I made it 76% of the way through this book, and I have no intention of spending more time trying to finish it. Dear Mr. Faulkner, I promise you there is no shortage of periods! You can put one or two more into your writing without worrying that there won’t be any left for your future novels. I just can’t grasp what he’s saying. The colloquialisms befuddled me, the characters’ complicated family entanglements gave me a headache. It took me forever to conclude Tennie’s Jim was a man, and not someone’s pet. I’m still not sure what a Turl is. I’m sure Faulkner has submerged a wealth of meaning just out of my grasp, and if I were taking a course on it I would appreciate it. But I’m not grasping the meaning, and I’ve got other books to read with my time.

Those of you who’ve read a few of my posts will have probably gathered that I just don’t appreciate Faulkner. (I gave him a chance. I really did.) I admire his writing, and I could see possibly enjoying a collection of short stories where I don’t have to hold all that crap in my head for a whole novel, but his full length stories just don’t do it for me. And since there are more books in the world than any one person could possibly read in several lifetimes, I am making an effort to only spend my limited time on ones that I enjoy.

Like this:

Originally published January 22nd, 2015
I think all the hype I heard before reading this book wound up working against it in the end. I was extremely disappointed. Usually, I appreciate satire. Especially when directed against the government or society, and its propensity to do things the way things have always been done, or the way it has been ordered to, without questioning or thinking about whether things should be done that way. But I just didn’t find myself appreciating the way Heller illuminated society’s faults. Maybe it was the graphic violence. Maybe it was the pointless deaths. Maybe it was the cardboard, space-filler women he reflexively shoved into the narrative. Heller’s men and women tend to come from two specific areas of society: the men are in the military and the women are prostitutes. But where the men are unique individuals (though they’re not impressive, inspiring, or even decent), the women are exactly the same. That’s one of my literary pet peeves. Though to be fair Heller did write this in the ’60s, and I guess at that point not everyone had figured out women weren’t all cloned from Eve.

I enjoyed Heller’s writing style. His descriptions are unusual and creative, and in the future I could see myself reading one of his other books. Giving him another chance. I’ll let you know how that goes, and if anything changes.